


Is Also Great And Would Suffice

by theswearingkind



Category: Bandom - Fall Out Boy RPS
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theswearingkind/pseuds/theswearingkind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete tried a few more times over the years, dreaming aloud of how sweet it could be, but no dice; Patrick was set in his life, no matter what he might have wanted, no matter if he liked it or not.</p><p>A <i>Brokeback Mountain</i> AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is Also Great And Would Suffice

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written several years ago, for the [](http://peterickfics.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://peterickfics.livejournal.com/)**peterickfics** Movie Marathon Challenge - my film was _Brokeback Mountain_ , though this is really more novella-inspired. Was also used as a challenge fill for the LJ Comm 7_Virtues, for the challenge of "patience."
> 
> Title from Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice." Beta'd by and dedicated to [](http://trascendenza.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://trascendenza.livejournal.com/)**trascendenza** , who shared both of these fandoms with me, for a while.

pete wentz was older than patrick stump by several years, but no one would have known it by his manner, which was excitable as a boy’s and quick to stir but lacked the mean edge that sometimes lurked behind patrick’s outward calm.

they met because they neither of them could get summer work in one of the towns that dotted the vast stretches of back-flat farmland covering the distance between midwest and west and so had to take work herding sheep for fuck-all pay on the side of a mountain further north, out toward signal, wyoming.

they shared little in common except a location and an origin, chicago, though patrick had left young, when his mother remarried, and pete, who was a city boy at heart, hadn’t gone until he reached his eighteenth birthday and had no choice.

patrick thought pete was brown-skinned as an Indian and horse-faced as his mare, but all in all would likely not be so bad a companion for the summer as he’d feared.

*

per the boss-man’s instructions it was decided that patrick would stay in base camp and that pete would sleep further up the mountain to keep an eye on the sheep, though pete cussed a blue streak at that – he didn’t mind so much that it was illegal, but he thought it hard to have to give up the relative warmth of their low-altitude camp for the frequent summer snows where the sheep grazed atop the mountain. pete said he figured he was covering near to fifteen miles a day, what with riding in and out for meals, and he bitched about it until patrick, who did not mind the cold of the high bluffs nor the quiet of hours spent a-horseback, offered to switch just to shut him up.

after some considerable initial awkwardness – patrick was not overly given to speech and despite his general like of the man found pete’s occasional torrents of words disconcerting – they found a few topics of discussion about which both had some little to say, women chief among them. patrick would be getting married in the winter to a girl he’d known for a few years by the name of anna and planned to use the money he made that summer to buy a little place for the two of them to start a family; pete asked to see a picture of her, but patrick had not thought to bring one up the mountain. pete said he was messing around with girl younger even than patrick, nothing serious at the moment but he reckoned he might marry her one day down the road.

patrick had carried with him up the mountain an old guitar, strapped tight across his back for safe-keeping, that nothing could have convinced him to leave behind, and when they ran out of words he often played songs he’d learned or made up; if there had been whiskey with the day’s rations, he could be persuaded to sing along. pete told patrick that his singing was at least a nice change from the snorting of the horses, but he privately thought that the way patrick’s voice wrapped comfortably around the vowels and stretched the consonants into long, messy lines big as the sky over them was something approaching miraculous.

pete, who had brought with him a busted-up harmonica, old and cheap and beginning to rust, spent the long camp days attempting to play it and mostly failing, hitting on the right notes purely by mistake, whooping for joy when he managed to string together a tune. he reserved his seriousness for those nights when the meals were cooked, the horses fed and watered, and there was still light enough to see by, when he would sometimes take from his pack a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil nub he was obliged to sharpen with his knife and write until his hands cramped up or the night got too dark, whichever came first.

they took to spending their evenings together, patrick leaving later and later to return to the woolies, until one night the whiskey and the lateness of the hour and the unaccustomed friendship convinced him it was too late to return at all. despite being mid-July it was balls-cold on the mountain, and pete gave patrick his extra blanket to ward off the chill of the dying fire after his offer to share the tent was rejected, though he made sure to say it was patrick’s own fault if he froze to death and that in the event of that pete would certainly not be the one to haul the frost-bitten corpse down from camp. round about two the chattering of patrick’s teeth grew so pronounced that pete, who was never much of a sleeper but had managed through aid of the whiskey to doze off for a couple of hours, gave up trying to drown out the noise and announced that if patrick did not get his sorry ass in the tent before pete woke up good and proper that there would be piss in his boots come morning.

they ended up back to front under the blanket, both fully dressed but shivering for all that, and by the time the hour broke three they came to know one another considerably better. pete in some fit of madness caught hold of patrick’s hand and brought it to his cock, half-swollen under the denim of his jeans; and whether by luck or fate patrick did not pull away, instead hauled pete to all fours and used spit and fingers to guide his way, no place he’d been before but one he would return to before the night was out.

in the morning patrick woke to bright sunlight and a headache like a drumbeat in his ears, pete curled toward him in his sleep, pants still undone. he managed to escape up the mountain without waking pete and spent the day hunting a coyote that had gotten into the sheep overnight, leaving the stench of blood and shit and mangled flesh everywhere near his pup-tent. he shot the bastard with a man’s good aim and strung him up as warning and reminder.

when he rode back down that night for dinner, pete was waiting for him, stretched out long and low beside the campfire. for once he seemed to have nothing to say, just watched patrick from under his eyelids while he ate and waited for his cue. after too long a silence to be entirely coincidental pete said he reckoned there wasn’t nothing wrong with it, but that patrick should know he wasn’t queer. patrick said he was relieved to hear it and that he wasn’t either. their business was their own.

with the inexhaustibility of youth they took to going at it every mealtime, in the broad daylight and up until dark. once a hailstorm left patrick stranded again in base camp, and they fucked from moonrise until the haze of dawn knocked them out.

*

the end of summer came even quicker than they’d thought, one storm too many blowing in from the pacific, and it was not yet september when they brought the herd down, a number somewhat less smaller than had gone up. the boss-man looked fit to kill when he forked over their pay, less the month’s salary the storm had stolen from them, and told them they could save themselves the trouble of applying next year.

pete was headed south for texas and the rodeo circuit, patrick back to his girl in riverton, and though they were back off the mountain, pete could not stop himself from putting his hands on patrick one more time, low on his back and curling down. patrick with a flash of red punched him full in the mouth, drove off while pete was still cussing and spitting blood into the dirt. he managed to get almost back to the highway before the pain in his gut grew so bad he had to pull over and stumble out of the truck to retch, hot dry things that tore at the back of his throat.

within three months’ time he had married anna and had her knocked up by new year’s, another one coming within the year after that. he thought on pete something fierce sometimes but could find no occasion or means to contact him, and after all, there were the girls now. mollie was pushing four and catie just two when he got the postcard in the mail, strange expressive scrawl pushing up against the address lines: _hey man, this probably shouldve come a long time ago. i’m coming through for business on the 10th of next month, thought maybe i could buy you a beer. if you feel up for it let me know, pete wentz._ patrick didn’t even think, just wrote back, _yeah, see you then._

late on the evening of the tenth headlights poured in through the front windows of the small apartment. after half a dozen false starts that day, patrick could just make out the shock of black hair on the driver’s head and with an energy he thought he’d lost ran to meet him. the full-on sight of pete’s face gave patrick a hot jolt in his stomach and again he didn’t think, just crowded pete up against the brick of the stairwell, not quite in plain view but close enough, and car-crashed their mouths together, their shared fierceness and pete’s horse teeth almost drawing blood. when at last they parted anna was standing in the doorway, face wiped blank, and what she’d seen or not seen could not then be helped.

within the hour they checked into a motel thirty miles away and took to reacquainting themselves, finding that despite the years not much had changed: once they started, it was more difficult than they’d thought to stop. they ended up escaping into the mountains for a few days, leaving anna with the girls and the promise that they’d bring back some fish. they pitched camp near water and jumped in stark naked, just because they could and wanted to, and did it dripping wet.

sprawled naked on the bank, pete revealed that he’d gone and gotten married himself, to a pretty little thing from down in richardson, texas, ashlee, and got a job working for her daddy. he said he reckoned old man joe hated his guts and that the feeling was mutual, but he was making money hand over fist and had not been able to see a real reason to leave. there was a baby, a boy. patrick allowed he’d wanted a boy at first but loved his girls so much he couldn’t see the point, now. he had no head for business like pete did and still earned his wages as a herder or feeder, whichever was needed.

pete was flying high on the idea that the two of them could get away from the places they’d gone to, thought they might go back to chicago together – what was wrong in richardson or riverton was hardly thought on at all back east and anyhow ashlee’s daddy had as good as offered him hard money to get lost – but patrick shot that down quick and no two ways about it. for all he’d been born in chicago, he’d been raised in wyoming, and world of wyoming was what he knew. two men was no good.

pete tried a few more times over the years, dreaming aloud of how sweet it could be, but no dice; patrick was set in his life, no matter what he might have wanted, no matter if he liked it or not.

*

what pete longed for and remembered best out of all their time together was a night that first summer when patrick had been playing something slow and sad on his guitar, something of his own making, and there was a tentative moment when he began to sing – and pete’s words came out of his mouth, fit to the music like a hand to a glove.

despite their frequent couplings both that summer and in the years to follow, pete looked on that moment as the one and only time they had ever really been inside each other.

*

by the time it all broke apart they were middle-aged, grown men with kids near to grown themselves. pete eventually got fed up with ashlee’s daddy, told old joe he could go fuck himself and started his own business, making more money than he’d ever thought possible, and when he got lonely he found ways to spend it. patrick stayed as poor as he’d ever been, poorer after his divorce went through and he found himself paying out child support to the tune of two-hundred-fifty bucks a month. they saw each other twice a year, three times if luck was on their side, and usually just days at a time; the splitting up never got easier, though it got more familiar. what time they had was never enough.

in may of that year they spent a week working their way through the sierra madres, drinking and fucking and finding trails long forgotten. beside the campfire patrick let on that he had been messing around with a waitress back in riverton, a pretty curly-haired thing, but there was nothing behind it. pete for his part said he was sneaking around with the wife of an employee, a transplant all the way from new jersey, and that half the time he thought ashlee knew and half the time the husband. three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey in, he returned to the old tune he’d given up on in recent years – some nights, he said, he got to missing patrick so bad he almost couldn’t stand it.

the trucks were loaded to head back to life when patrick finally broke the news he’d been avoiding all week: he couldn’t get the time off from work, so there would be no trip in august, as they’d planned. it would be november before they saw each other again, and even then for less time than he’d hoped – four days, maybe five. pete thought of six goddamn months of waiting and lonesome in exchange for four fucking days of what was never enough and put up as much of a fight as he could, but it was one-sided and they both knew it. nothing new was said, nothing old was resolved. they got on.

*

it was months before patrick heard of it, his postcard confirming the november trip returned stamped with a red _deceased_. in a panic he could not remember ever having felt, he dialed the number he’d never before let himself call. the sugar-sweet voice that answered was not pete’s.

she said it had been an accident, pete changing his tire late one night outside a bar when it exploded, knocked him unconscious while he drowned in his own blood. patrick knew different – chicago, wyoming, texas, it made no matter: two men was no good.

*

if patrick had been asked he would have said that he had given no less than he had been asked for, but deep down he knew that there was belief and there were lies, and the best part of the latter was that they fit so comfortably into the former.

\- el fin.

_but the prince of any failing empire know that everybody wants / everybody wants to drive on through the night when it’s a drive back home / things aren’t the same anymore / some nights it gets so bad / he almost picked up the phone_


End file.
